As the popularity of computing devices and mobile computing devices (e.g., smartphones) increases and the applications for these devices continue to develop with diversified functions, more and more users are using these devices for the purposes of connecting to the Internet, taking pictures, listening to music, watching movies, sharing information, and the like. Although these computing devices improve the convenience of our life, the data stored in the devices becomes increasingly large, and there are significant issues such as the privacy of a user and the confidentiality of data.
Moreover, when a user works with such a computer or mobile device, the user constantly modifies or creates different files and objects (e.g., some local, some remote)—by writing messages, posting forum/blog entries, taking pictures, loading pictures from other sources, and the like. Further, the data relating to these actions is not separately recorded for a backup for the particular user. Rather, a conventional backup utility only deals with modified files over a period of time on a particular computer system (or a mobile device) and writes them into the backup. The conventional backup utility is not concerned with any personal user data such as, for example, data reflecting who has created or modified or downloaded the files. In other words, the conventional backup is focused on restoration of a previous state of the computer system (or a mobile device) as a whole rather than focusing on the personal user data.